http://wwwredesign.gentoo.org

After receiving a ton of very useful feedback from the developer community I have updated the redesign. It should now be closer to 100% accessible and it should (hopefully) render perfectly in all browsers including text only browsers. It now passes XHTML and CSS validation tests.

I’m asking for everyone (developers and users alike) to please have a look at the updated site and send any feedback you may have. I’m especially interested in feedback from anyone who uses accessibilty programs such as screen readers or if you are color blind or have any other accessibilty issues.

Also, I only use GNU/Linux and I have only tested on the following browsers:

Mozilla-1.7
firefox-1.0
Opera-8.5
Internet Explorer-6 under CrossOver Office
Epiphany-1.8.2
Links-2.1 in text mode and graphics mode.

If you have access to a Macintosh, Windows, *BSD or any other OS or Browser please test the site and include your OS and the browser version in your feedback. I haven’t received feedback from Konqueror or Safari so feedback from those browsers would be much appreciated.

The only major outstanding issue is the contents of the menu in the grey bar at the top and what should appear in the 5 purple boxes directly under them. Currently I have that menu listed in order of what a new Gentoo user would need to access first. If you have a better idea of what should be included in this menu or think something important is being left out please send that in your feedback as well.

Thanks in advance

Curtis

4 thoughts on “”

  1. I have looked at the site with:

    Mac OS X 10.4.3
    Safari 2.0.2 (416.12)

    I clicked around for a couple of minutes without finding any bugs (exept the one above, but that one is server side, right?)

    You’ve done a really nice job.

    I will happily accept more OSX-testing if you like. just mail me.

    Regards
    Tobias

  2. Hi.
    Stream of thoughts:

    Layout:

    You limited the number of blocks in a page to – 3 horizontal menus, some marketing buzz (big!), news section, and adverts.

    3 hr menus is too much. 19 links also. The list of links and their position seems not to be clear. In the most visible one (with gray background) there is a link “GWN” – mistrerious for newcomers. Some links are duplicated (or even triplicated), handbook is next to docs (wtf?).
    In the last menu, the most visible link is the “donation” one, because it has different colours.

    Design:

    It seems to me that the polished parts are top (excluding the menu below the gray one) and the bottom.
    I don’t like the green links color, but it’s personal point of view, no need to care about.
    I have problem with the background of last menu, there is something, it’s very hard to read what’s there. It makes unnecesarry buzz. It would look much better as a one long picture of anything, or sth completly abstractive. The problem is that I can see that there is sth part of computer, someones shoulder blurred etc. But I need to spend time to see that.

    Overall, the design is quite nice, but the layout is not.

    If I can give you a few suggestions basing on my experience

    1) Define the target. Who is the target of this site. If you have mutiply targets (Potential users, potential clients, returning users, journalists etc.) that you want to focus on, prioritize them.
    2) Define the list of widgets/objects/blocks interesting for particular groups. If you want to focus on newcomers, the big one-click “download” button must be there. (I know that it’s not easy with Gentoo, but it should be at most two-clicks, or a short list with 2-3 options and link to “other versions”).
    3) Look at others sites:
    http://www.apple.com/macosx/
    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/default.mspx
    http://www.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org
    http://fedora.redhat.com/
    http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
    http://www.xandros.com/
    http://www.linspire.com/
    http://slax.linux-live.org/
    http://www.slackware.com/
    http://www.knoppix.com/
    http://www.debian.org/

    They’re making mistakes, but some of them are “nice”. Don’t care to look at the design. The one you provided is nice and gentooish. Look at layout.

    4) Once you have some list of target groups, they’re needs, and you noted some things from other sites, imho you should start from the scratch.

    My advices would be to move the last menu to top (where the green one is) WITH some nice background, similar to current one but shared between links, change the list of links in both menus, limit the marketing text and add three links with cute OS icons to download “Gentoo 2005.1 ISO”. (less white space!).
    Think twice about so much space for news. I’m not sure if newcomers need those news, and they’d for sure prefer some feature list with screenshots/graphs.
    I also don’t like the adverts. On the old site you have so much objects that the adverts seems to be hidden, but on the new one, the list of adverts is much more visible.

    Overall. I would think more about “what is Gentoo” and “what are the key features” and “what brand I want to give to user”. My personal feelings are that Gentoo is fast, stable, polished, complex, original idea, gives a lot of power to the user. Don’t cheat with “easy for newbies” – it’s not. But I would try to attract admins, geeks, people who knows what’s going on around and key-decision-IT-people in companies.
    To do that I’d present some most interesting features with screenshots and/or graphs presenting speed comparsion, portage’s idea etc.
    If there is also a big list of “FAQ” I would place some answers also but in the form of “features”. (so, in example if common FAQ is “Gentoo is slow to install”, the feature on main page is “Gentoo allows you to customize your OS in revolutionary way. The time spent on configuring it will pay back in overall speed and security. Your system will be exactly like you want it to be.” etc.)

    I know, I’m talking about is as a product, but I believe that websites are for that. 🙂 And remember that journalists will make their opinion basing on main page (in rare cases those lazy folks will click on “about”).
    They need keyfeatures and screenshots/graphs for their articles. If they won’t give it to them they’ll start trying to write on their own, without any knowledge (they’re lazy, I told you!). So help them, give them everything they need to write a nice praising article about Gentoo and they’ll be happy (cause you saved their time), and you’ll be happy (cause they wrote some nice thing about Gentoo).
    Ok. That’s all for now. If you are interested in my help, you can mail me. But I don’t know much about Gentoo under-the-hood like foundation etc. I’m ordinary Gentoo user 🙂

  4. That’s a very *painful* shade of green text. It really clashes with the colors on the rest of the page, and hurts readability.

    Also, there’s not enough information visible on the page. For those of us with 15″ monitors, we have to do an awful lot of scrolling to see content such as headlines and so on. Mostly, the top graphic takes up too much vertical area, and the news items below it are too far down; too much vertical separation. Not that I’m trying to remove whitespace just because, but it just doesn’t look right.

    Additionally, I miss the left sidebar. That space was actually quite useful; it presented several useful quick links to various parts of g.o, all easily accessed. I like their new design, but I think their placement at the bottom of the page is a poor choice. Could they be vertically stacked to the left?

    Overall, I’m okay with the new, more corporate approach to the design. However, what really makes a good corporate and/or useful site, is, in my opinion, having a lot of information (but not too much, or else it’s cluttered like the current design!) immediately available (w/out descending into dense link trees), conveniently placed (w/out much scrolling), and of course, thoughtfully chosen colors.

    That said, it looks like the redesign is on its way to being more useful than the current site.

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